I have been trying to come up with idea for stories in my local newspaper, but although i have been doing content analysis and close text analysis on local newspapers i have collected (which i will post on the blog once i have scanned them) i have still found this very difficult.
Here are some things i think i need to consider in order to decide what would be a successful story in my local newspaper:

• How local do i consider as local?
• a local Newspaper can be very local as the "Thornbury Gazette" - the problem with working this local is that there are less interesting.
• I could work with a less local newspaper something similar to the the Bristol "Evening Post". This is still classed as local but in a larger scale which mean there are more oppertunities to find stories as i am looking within a larger community
• Also i have noticed it has became common within local newspapers to use a worldwide stories with a local view on this. I think this is a good idea as i can use more interesting world stories, which is likely to be more exciting

I am going to look on the "Evening Post" website, on order to give me more ideas about what what is going on in my local community, and how they use more world stories with a local spin off. Heres a link to the website http://www.thisisbristol.co.uk/.

Applying Narrative Theroy to Newspapers

The research me and my classmates have done on narrative theory's is not much use to me unless I apply it to Newspapers to link it to my coursework. I am going to look through some local newspaper and try to see which narrative theory's apply to the story, so that I can see what is most common and what work. Once I have done this i will decide whether I think its suitable to follow these conventions and challenge them. This will help me a lot when I write my newspaper story, as it will give me a structure and narrative idea to work with, which will inspire my story and the style of my writing.

I am going to randomly choose stories from a few local newspaper and see which narrative theories apply:

From the Evening Post, on Wednesday 7th October..
From top left story on page 27.
The story "Cafe in line for £5,000 food award". The story is about a cafe in Eastville which is taking part in a competitions with a chance of winning a £5,000 prize.
The narrative of this story:

• Begins: "Cafe in Eastville run by same family since 1964 has made it into the regional final of the Market Kitchen Local Food Heroes Awards 2009.
• Ends: "Judges will select one winner from each region as well as selecting one overall national champion by the end of October"
• The rest of the article goes into detail about what the competitions will consisted of and talks about the family and cafe that have entered.

Fitting this story to narrative theory's:

• Todorovs Theory: This theory would have the equilibrium as the audience is at first told about the family and the cafe they own, The disturbance of the Cafe getting into the final of the competition - something significant has changed for the family who own the cafe. Resolution, however this story does not have a resolution yet, as the newspaper was written before the results of the competition. So the reader does not learn about the family in the story getting a new equilibrium dependent on the results of the competition. Therefore some factors of this story fit Todorovs theory, yet does not completely follow this story as the story is 'unfinished' according to Todorovs theory.